[rescue] Do you remember when? Security software..... (waaay the f**k of topic)

[N.Miller]

On Saturday, August 16, 2003, at 10:10 AM, Dave McGuire wrote:
>   Companies are spending time, effort, and money to protect themselves 
> from their employees because they're creating environments in which 
> their employees hate their company.  They no longer care about or 
> respect their employees, on either a personal or professional level.

This is no different from what happened in the late 19th and very early 
20th century.  It *will* turn around and bite them on the ass--it may 
take another  generation, and a depression to do so, but it will happen.

>  She got back from lunch one day and couldn't log into her 
> machine...that's how she found out.  They laid off four of the twelve 
> people in her group with no notice and no severance.
>   She got a letter of reference from her former boss, but she was the 
> only one who did.  The line to everyone else was "as a matter of 
> company policy, we don't provide reference letters".  When this policy 
> was questioned, the response was "if we give someone a good reference 
> and they perform badly at their new company, it reflects badly on us!"
>   ...do you see something wrong with this?

I have a problem with the former.  That approach completely sucks ass 
because the people in her company didn't have the cojones to give the 
bad news.  I *hate* that shit.

The latter is typical, and is a legal liability issue.  I know of *no* 
corporation in Silicon Valley where you will get anything resembling a 
"reference" from a company.  If anyone contacts my former employers 
(well, except for the one that went bankrupt ;-), all they will get is 
"she worked here from X to Y, and these were her titles"--and even the 
latter is a maybe.  They will also answer if asked if there were any  
legal issues surrounding my employment--i.e. were any charges ever laid 
against me in the context of my employment, or any lawsuits [0].

This is the #1 reason why all personal references are highly 
suspect--you can pretty much have anyone you want tell a "reference" 
story.

=Nadine=

[0] The "charges" question gets asked regularly as there were a couple 
of fairly large lawsuits in Silicon Valley in the early '90's due to 
employees being fired for cause because of lawsuits/illegal activities 
yet the new employers were not given that information when asked for 
employment verification.  Iirc, one of these cases involved Cisco.  Of 
course, you wonder, why then do they bother with background checks, if 
they can't even turn up this sort of stuff.